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Email could have been X.400 times better

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Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#131

Post by pseudohadamard »

kstrauser wrote: post #80
MisterTea wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, Anyone remember the promise of ATM networking in the 90's? It was telecom grade networking which used circuit switched networking that would handle voice, video and data down one pipe. Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a…

I was there for ATM, and I'm so freaking glad it lost. It's a prime example of "a camel is a horse designed by committee". A 53 byte cell with a 48 byte payload? Of course! What an excellent idea! We definitely want a 10% overhead on a ludicrously small packet, just so it has tolerable voice latencies if you scale it down to run on a 64Kb DS0, never mind that literally everything in the industry was scaling up to fat…

Thus its acronym, A Technical Mistake. Or, from the telco side, A Tariffing Mechanism.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#132

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Argh. That red book. I may still have my copy around, somewhere.

X.400 was an “all things, to all men” solution; kinda like TIFF, for images.

I worked on an X.400 product, that never got out of the crib.

You could do things like specify the route that the email took, which was important, because there was support for microtransactions, all along the way. You could do things like pay extra for “premium delivery,” and “registered”-like messages.

It was really crazy. It did work, though.

The issue with specs like that, however, is they only ever get partially implemented. If you have an infrastructure, composed of many partial steps, it can be a mess.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#133

Post by pseudohadamard »

jech wrote: post #82
rstuart4133 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doh! Of course it was easier to implement. IETF wants a working open source implementation before standardising. Have you ever tried to implement an ITU standard from just reading the specs? It's hard. Firstly you have to spend a lot of money just to buy the specs. Then you find the spec is written by somebody who has a proprietary product, and is tiptoeing along a line that reveals enough information to keep the sta…

> IETF wants a working open source implementation before standardising. I don't think that's IETF policy. Individual IETF working groups decide whether to request publication of an RFC, and the availability of open source implementations is a strong argument in favour of publication, but not a hard requirement. If the IETF standards are sometimes useful, it's more a matter of culture than of policy.

A great example of this was PKIX, whose policy was "we'll publish it as a standard and someone else will have to figure out how to make it work". There are 20-year-old standards-track PKIX documents that have no known implementations.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#134

Post by pseudohadamard »

jcranmer wrote: post #55
pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…

WebPKI is derived from X.509, but I don't think X.509 lives on anymore. X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP, which is still in very heavy use today. There's still some X.400 systems in existence. I think some of the early cellphone generations may have used the ITU standards in the physical layer? Of course, the biggest--and weirdest--success of the ITU standards is that the OSI model is still frequently the way net…

  X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP
No, LDAP was a student project from UMich that somehow gained mindshare because (a) it wasn't ISO, and (b) it cleverly had an 'L' in front of it. It's now more complex and heavyweight than the original DAP, but people think it isn't because of that original clever bit of marketing.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#135

Post by MiddleEndian »

convolvatron wrote: post #81
kstrauser wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there for ATM, and I'm so freaking glad it lost. It's a prime example of "a camel is a horse designed by committee". A 53 byte cell with a 48 byte payload? Of course! What an excellent idea! We definitely want a 10% overhead on a ludicrously small packet, just so it has tolerable voice latencies if you scale it down to run on a 64Kb DS0, never mind that literally everything in the industry was scaling up to fat…

note that it was 'tolerable latency without echo cancellation in France', most other places had long enough latency anyways that they needed to have it anyways. and of course now everything needs echo cancellation. I think standards are important, and I'm sad that no one bothers anymore, but stuff like this and the inclusion of interlace in digital video for that little 3 year window when it might have mattered does…

Not The Silliest Contrivance to happen to video standards :P

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#136

Post by nofriend »

MisterTea wrote: post #24
pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…

> It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, Anyone remember the promise of ATM networking in the 90's? It was telecom grade networking which used circuit switched networking that would handle voice, video and data down one pipe. Instead of carelessly flinging packets into the ether like an savage, you had a…

Was it actually superior though? The usual treatment is that packet switching works better at the scale of the internet. With voice, hogging a whole line works, but for the internet it makes more sense to slow everybody down when congestion occurs rather than preventing some people from connecting at all. I get why the telecoms would have you waste your bandwidth reserving a connection you don't need, and I get why they would try and sell that as a superior solution because of some nonsense about reliability, but I don't see it as providing much benefit to the user.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#137

Post by bombcar »

wat10000 wrote: post #122
packetlost wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, are you serious? This is how it works?

This is how old-school TCP figures out how fast it can send data, regardless of the underlying transport. It ramps up the speed until it starts seeing packet loss, then backs off. It will try increasing speed again after a bit, in case there's now more capacity, and back off again if there's loss.

You can achieve a bit of performance here by tuning it so it will never exceed the true speed of the link - which is only really useful when you know what that is and can guarantee it.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#138

Post by waynecochran »

addaon wrote: post #99

I still think the missing opportunity with e-mail was for the USPS (back in the US-dominant internet days) to take a leading role and implement "e-stamps." Provide a subscription service that managed a per-user account, cost a 1¢ stamp to send a message, and guaranteed delivery of messages received with a 1¢ stamp on them -- with the received stamp value being put in the user's account, so a user who received more ma…

Yes. I don't know if this is exactly the recipe, but something akin to this could have .. no should have .. existed. Probably 1¢ is too much. Also, full public key encryption and digital signatures should be easily integrated by now as well. I know the whole trust problem ... yadda yadda ... I don't even read my email hardly at all anymore -- I want everyone that needs to get a hold of me don't rely on email.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#139

Post by pzb »

jcranmer wrote: post #55
pjc50 wrote: post #14

>> SMTP "“didn’t win because it was ‘better,’” he argued, but “just because it was easier to implement." Yes - and this is actually really important! It's true of most of the important early internet technologies. It's the entire reason "internet" standards won over "telco" (in this case ITU) standards - the latter could only be deployed by big coordinated efforts, while internet standards let individual decentralize…

WebPKI is derived from X.509, but I don't think X.509 lives on anymore. X.500 was stripped down to form LDAP, which is still in very heavy use today. There's still some X.400 systems in existence. I think some of the early cellphone generations may have used the ITU standards in the physical layer? Of course, the biggest--and weirdest--success of the ITU standards is that the OSI model is still frequently the way net…

X.509 absolutely lives on -- https://www.itu.int/rec/t-rec-x.509 last update was October 2024. However WebPKI uses PKIX which is fairly stubbornly stuck on RFC5280.

On the ITU side, they have made improvements including allowing a plain fully qualified domain name as the subject of a certificate, as an alternative to sequence of set of attributes.

Re: Email could have been X.400 times better

#140

Post by maguay »

addaon wrote: post #99

I still think the missing opportunity with e-mail was for the USPS (back in the US-dominant internet days) to take a leading role and implement "e-stamps." Provide a subscription service that managed a per-user account, cost a 1¢ stamp to send a message, and guaranteed delivery of messages received with a 1¢ stamp on them -- with the received stamp value being put in the user's account, so a user who received more ma…

And yet, when the USPS did deliver email (via paper, no less, with their E-COM system), over half of the message volume was sent by one mass-mailer: https://buttondown.com/blog/the-e-com-story

Afraid the spammers will always be with us.

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